How To Write Copy For Your Own Business
My number one piece of advice regarding generating copy for your business is this: Hire a copywriter. It’s worth the money, and — so long as you hire a good copywriter — will almost always yield better results than trying to do it yourself. Trust me; it’s not as easy as it looks. However, hiring a copywriter isn’t always possible. It might be out of budget, you’re just starting up, or you don’t have the time to find the right person. For situations where hiring a professional copywriter is out of the question, use this guide.
Note: This guide is designed for generating copy for a specific project. Whether that’s a website, a brochure, a memo, use this guide when you have a project underway. It is not a guide to ‘teach copywriting skills.’
Step 1: Outline Your Project
Outlining your project is the best way to ensure you don’t get off course. There is no right or wrong way to do an outline, but if you’ve never written an outline before, this process should be efficient and straightforward.
Begin with your project’s title or goal — for example, the ‘About Us’ section of our website. For demonstration purposes, we will pretend that you are starting a local design agency.
The next step is to list out the critical information that needs to be included in the copy. In this example, that would be:
- We are a new design agency
- We are passionate
- We guarantee results
- We have over 50 years experience between us
- We are based in New Orleans, LA
- We specialize in web design, but have experience in print layout design as well.
Step 2: Write A Rough Draft
Once you have all of your ideas down on paper, ask yourself, “What result do I want this copy to achieve?” In almost all cases, you are writing this copy in hopes that the reader will take a specific action. What is that action? In our example here, we want the client to reach out. We are hoping that they will read about us and be compelled to hire us. With that in mind, we will write a quick first draft.
We are NOLA Design a design agency that is passionate and guarantee results. We have over 50 years experience between all our employees. We are based in New Orleans Louisiana. We specalize in web design, but have experience in print layout design also. Please contact us today.
If we turn our outline into copy with no thought or strategy, it might look like the above — and that’s okay. You have your first draft, which is a wonderful place to start. We’re going to start by running this copy through Grammarly to catch all the basic mistakes.
As you can see, we have several. Grammarly is an excellent tool for cleaning up copy, but it is not perfect. In my experience, there is typically at least one ‘mistake’ that Grammarly will either be wrong about or will offer a suggestion that is incorrect. In this case, Grammarly is suggesting we switch the word ‘between’ with the word ‘with.’
The sentence would become, “We have over 50 years experience with all our employees.” That would suggest that our brand new company has been working with the employees for 50 years, but that is not what we are trying to say.
In this situation, you can Google the sentence you are trying to fix to get some new ideas. How do other companies say this? A quick search will show you that many other organizations use the term ‘combined experience.’ We might also notice that several organizations refer to their employees as their ‘team’ instead. So let’s change that sentence to:
“Our team has over 50 years of combined experience.”
And now we get a green light from Grammarly — Great! But you’re not done yet. Just because your copy doesn’t contain errors does not make it good copy.
Step 3: Read It Out Loud
The next step makes a great team exercise, but you can also do this by yourself. Read the copy out loud to see how to sounds. You can record yourself and then play it back, or simply recite it several times. Are there any portions that sound weird or clunky? In most cases, people produce the best writing when they write the way they talk. Naturally, this means bringing in a team will help you generate different perspectives and ideas.
Here is an example of what I came up with:
NOLA Design is a passionate and experienced agency based in New Orleans, LA. Our team has over 50 years of combined experience in web and print design, and we guarantee excellent results for every client. Contact us today about your next project!
This copy is short and straight to the point, communicating everything we wanted to say in just three short sentences. Once you have your finished version, run it through Grammarly one more time to make sure there are no mistakes. When your copy is clean and sounds pleasing to the ear — congratulations! You’ve just written some good copy!
Other Tips
Brand Voice
The example above uses a fictional, underdeveloped brand. You will likely want to consider your ‘brand voice’ when developing the copy. If you are unsure of your brand’s voice, consider different traits you would associate with a person. If your brand was your friend, how would you describe them? Are they fun? Authoritative? Direct? Gentle? Firm? Use those characteristics to adjust the tone of your copy.
Longer Copy
If you are writing a longer piece of copy or content for your business, you may want to use another tool in addition to Grammarly. HemingwayApp is a tool that will examine your text for difficult-to-read sentences. It will highlight them in yellow and red so you can make changes. Once you paste your copy into HemingwayApp, you’ll be able to see what the reading level is for your document. The average person can read at a 9th-grade level and is most comfortable reading two levels below their ability. Aim for a 6th or 7th-grade reading level.
Hire Professionals If You Can
While this guide will help you generate good copy if you find yourself in a bind, it is not comprehensive. Don’t forget that a professional copywriter can do wonderful things for your project. There are too many aspects to copywriting to cover in this short guide. If you are working with an essential piece of content for your business, handle it like you would anything else. Hire a professional.
